Abstract:

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate Faulkner's use of women in the Snopes trilogy as representatives of a value system antithetical to that symbolized by Flem Snopes. In the trilogy Eula Varner Sroces, in particular, represents love, warmth, compassion, or the natural world. In contrast, Flem symbolizes hate, coldness, materialism, and inhumanity, or the social world. Faulkner reconciles these opposing systems in the characteristics developed in Eula's daughter Linda Snopes Kohl as she comes to represent values similar to Eula's.